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What would an art history of modernism look like that sought not to overcome or eliminate painterly figuration, but to attend to displaced and disparaged figures in it? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 warning about a “return to figuration” in European painting, figuration has been linked with questionable, if not highly suspect, aesthetic and political values – from nostalgia to repression. Buchloh inherits this this view from the historical avantgardes, which sought to counter conventions of figuration by developing disparate strategies of abstraction. And it is this view of figuration that guides both formalist and social art histories: For both share an anxiety about the authoritative figure of the human form. This seminar invites an alternative perspective on the artistic project of figuration. We look at modern and contemporary practices of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrogressive or authoritarian. These practices suggest ways of thinking the figure without an appeal to its coherent visibility or sovereign standing. We will read broadly in the contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black thought, and critical disability studies that share this investment (e.g. Butler, Cavarero, Garland-Thomson, Halberstam, Hartman, Honig, Sharpe, Wynter). We will critically reconsider Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’ project Formless: A User’s Guide, along with the turn of the twenty-first century debates about abjection, feminism, and “body art” it engaged. Artists under discussion include Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, Kara Walker, and Hannah Wilke, amongst others. For the final research paper, graduate students are encouraged to bring their own archives to the questions addressed in the seminar.